docker: extracting a layer from a image

Question

Let's take the whalesay images as an example. docker history shows the following:

IMAGE               CREATED             CREATED BY                                      SIZE                COMMENT
6b362a9f73eb        17 months ago       /bin/sh -c #(nop) ENV PATH=/usr/local/bin:/us   0 B
<missing>           17 months ago       /bin/sh -c sh install.sh                        30.37 kB
<missing>           17 months ago       /bin/sh -c git reset --hard origin/master       43.27 kB
<missing>           17 months ago       /bin/sh -c #(nop) WORKDIR /cowsay               0 B
<missing>           17 months ago       /bin/sh -c git clone https://github.com/moxie   89.9 kB
<missing>           17 months ago       /bin/sh -c apt-get -y update && apt-get insta   58.58 MB
<missing>           18 months ago       /bin/sh -c #(nop) CMD ["/bin/bash"]             0 B
<missing>           18 months ago       /bin/sh -c sed -i 's/^#\s*\(deb.*universe\)$/   1.895 kB
<missing>           18 months ago       /bin/sh -c echo '#!/bin/sh' > /usr/sbin/polic   194.5 kB
<missing>           18 months ago       /bin/sh -c #(nop) ADD file:f4d7b4b3402b5c53f2   188.1 MB

I'd like to extract the layer that says ADD file:bla. Is there a tool/way for doing this?

Answer 1

In this specific case, it looks like the ADD command added the base image to the file system. If you run docker history --no-trunc docker/whalesay, the full command is:

/bin/sh -c #(nop) ADD file:f4d7b4b3402b5c53f266bb7fdd7e728493d9a17f9ef20c8cb1b4759b6e66b70f in /

docker history reports that particular layer is 188MB. Let's look at these layers in more detail:

$ docker save docker/whalesay -o whalesay.tar
$ tar tvf whalesay.tar

...
-rw-r--r-- 0/0       197181952 2015-05-25 22:04 cc88f763e297503d2407d6b462b2b390a6fd006b30f51c8efa03dd88fa801b89/layer.tar
...

Looks like a pretty good candidate! You can now extract that layer and pull files out of it.

$ tar xf whalesay.tar cc88f763e297503d2407d6b462b2b390a6fd006b30f51c8efa03dd88fa801b89/layer.tar
$ tar xf cc88f763e297503d2407d6b462b2b390a6fd006b30f51c8efa03dd88fa801b89/layer.tar etc/passwd

If you're looking to pull a particular file out of a layer, but you don't know which layer, you could do this. First, extract all the layers:

$ tar xf whalesay.tar

Now you've got all the layers as individual .tar files. Let's find a file:

$ for layer in */layer.tar; do tar -tf $layer | grep docker.cow && echo $layer; done
usr/local/share/cows/docker.cow
0523c5a0c4588dde33d61d171c41c2dc5c829db359f4d56ab896ab1c185ed936/layer.tar
cowsay/cows/docker.cow
40e8ae7bb4e5b9eaac56f5be7aa614ed50f163020c87ba59e905e01ef0af0a4f/layer.tar
cowsay/cows/docker.cow
f9bc8676543761ff3033813257937aeb77e9bc84296eaf025e27fe01643927cf/layer.tar

Finally, extract the file from the layer you want:

$ tar xf 0523c5a0c4588dde33d61d171c41c2dc5c829db359f4d56ab896ab1c185ed936/layer.tar \
      usr/local/share/cows/docker.cow

This will extract that file with the full path relative to the current directory.

$ cat usr/local/share/cows/docker.cow 
##
## Docker Cow
##
$the_cow = <<EOC;
    $thoughts
     $thoughts
      $thoughts     
                    ##        .            
              ## ## ##       ==            
           ## ## ## ##      ===            
       /""""""""""""""""\___/ ===        
  ~~~ {~~ ~~~~ ~~~ ~~~~ ~~ ~ /  ===- ~~~   
       \\______ o          __/            
        \\    \\        __/             
          \\____\\______/   
EOC

Answer 2

It looks like other people would also like to have this feature, but unfortunately right now it does not seem to exist.

See also this issue and here a related request which got rejected.

If you're fine with saving the complete docker (docker save) and then extracting a tarball with your layer, then this is possible:

docker run -it <your image>
# do fancy stuff in the container
docker commit <your container> foobar # create image from container
docker history foobar # will show you the layers
docker save -o foobar.tar foobar # dumps container contents to foobar.tar

Now foobar.tar will contain the file system states from different times. Inspecting this tarball shows, in my case, a file repositories with

{"foobar":{"latest":"fdf43d96e691c57e9afb4b85dba2e6745146a7ca9076c7284c6b2e1f93434562"}}

which indicates, that the latest layer is fdf43.... You can get a tarball with the file system contents of this layer via

tar -x fdf43d96e691c57e9afb4b85dba2e6745146a7ca9076c7284c6b2e1f93434562/layer.tar -f foobar.tar

There is a tool, undocker, which automated this process, but I'm not sure whether it will work with the current format of the saved tar file.

Answer 3

I don't really understand what you mean by "extract" but if you want to get further information about image, run

docker inspect <image_name>

You you want to get file, then run container from this image. Try

docker export <container_name> > abc.tar

after that, extract abc.tar and find your file.

Answer 4

While not capable of extracting a specific layer, the docker-save-last-layer command line utility is made to extract the last layer only. Combined with docker build --squash you can avoid exporting the base layers. This may help to accomplish your goals.

It works by using a patched version of the docker daemon inside a docker image that can access the images on your host machine. So it doesn't require doing a full docker save before using it. This makes it performant for large base images.

Typical usage is simple and looks like:

pip install d-save-last

docker build --t myimage --squash .
d-save-last myimage -o ./myimage.tar